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I want to introduce you to A Little Book About Believing: The Transformative Healing Power of Faith, Love, and Surrender. It follows the quite astonishing events that took place in Brazil when I underwent ‘spiritual surgery’ from renowned healer John of God, and it opens the door to a new perspective on what it takes to heal from serious illness. Oprah herself visited the same place in March 2012, and that’s about the biggest spiritual endorsement you can get these days.

Anyway, this book, as unlikely as it seems at first, might just change your life. I don’t say this glibly. The effect it’s having on people’s perceptions of life and how they live theirs is quite astounding, even to me – and I wrote it. And this only increases every day as more and more of you read it and absorb its revolutionary message.

Apparently, the U.S. Army has ordered copies of the book twice, a nurse in one California hospital bulk-ordered some to give to patients, and a famous actor who’s seriously ill right now insisted on taking me to lunch after reading it. Plus, countless copies have been mailed around the world to regular people like you and me who were, as they say, “sick and tired of being sick and tired” and hungry for alternatives to poisonous pharmaceutical drugs, invasive surgery, and harmful radiation. More than any of that, though, they were looking for hope, as well as an assurance that there might possibly, after all, be another way.

“Started reading the book last night at elevenish,” someone wrote on Twitter recently. “Read til 4am, passed out. Finished it today less than an hour ago. I have you and your exquisite little book to thank for changing my life forever, intimately and positively.”

Those words gave me chills, quite honestly. And it’s a common reaction.

Having said all that, this wasn’t an easy book to get through the system. My agent turned it down outright, telling me there was no market for it and she wouldn’t take it on, which was a terrible bummer at the time.

However, rarely down for long, I did the next best thing: I dumped that agent for having no vision and set out to find a new one.

I approached a guy I knew who worked for a big New York agency. He’d loved my previous work, and, sure enough, he loved this too. Adored it actually, and said so. “I couldn’t put it down,” he gushed in an email. Which, to be honest, is what everyone says. “It kept me awake at nights thinking about it.”

So clearly he’d want to represent it, right?

Wrong! Too dangerous, he said. “If I represent this, I’ll be in trouble. I come from a family of doctors. They’ll never forgive me.”

Unbelievable. But here’s the thing: he didn’t really mean it was dangerous, did he? He meant it was new and different, and he was scared of it. That’s been true of many wonderful books in the past. Everything from Harry Potter to Chicken Soup for the Soul, they’ve all met with resistance at the start. Obstacles are part of the game.

It was then that it struck me.

What I was facing here was not opposition, was it? It was a series of sobering encounters with reality, to help me clarify my intention and galvanize my resolve. That’s all adversity is. It clarifies and galvanizes. Only when you’re faced with obstacles and setbacks do you find out what you’re made of. Did I believe in my wonderful little book enough to keep going with it through thick and thin until it made it to the stores? That was the question.

YES! – was the answer. Because, although I may lack certain qualities in other areas – God only knows! – I do have one quality which has got me through many a tight scrape in my life, and that’s fortitude. Otherwise called follow-through. Or persistence.

In the words of Sir Winston Churchill, I “…never, never, never, never give up.”

The Pay-Off

And sure enough, my fortitude paid off. The book is now a glorious, wonderful paperback. The kind of paperback I want to stroke and hug and flick through countless times, even though I know every word in it. Because I also know the amount of persistence it took to fend off the naysayers and get it to this point. If I built it, they would come, I was convinced of it.

And you know what? They did come. They came in impressive numbers, gushing praise, proving the naysayers wrong.

“Your book is important, incredibly well written, and totally compelling,” someone else wrote.

And today I found another comment on Facebook: “Wonderful, surprising, challenging, eye-opening, sensitive, touching….I’m running out of words. Just get it and read it. You will discover things about yourself, and about everything else! It’s life changing!!”

On page 18 of a little book about believing, it says the following:

“In this book we are crossing a bridge into the unknown, ready to challenge some of our holiest preconceptions about health and healing. In my view that’s a good thing. The mere fact that we’re discussing this topic at all will bring us to a place of new understanding. A place where hopefully someday we, the ordinary people, may not be such easy prey for serious illness and can instead choose to be its master, or even avoid it altogether.

“It’s an exciting journey, one that requires a flexible mind, a willing heart, and a readiness to release ingrained attitudes.”

Releasing ingrained attitudes is what the book industry needs to do too, by the sound of it. If they can turn their back on my ‘little book that could’, what other gems are they not publishing either? If you too have aspirations to write a book – or do anything else, frankly – and you believe in it enough and feel like the idea came from your very soul, then maybe all you need is to summon the necessary amount of faith and fortitude, keep your head held high, and never, never, never, never give up ’til you push on past the finish line.